Rami Ismail is something of a whirlwind. Co-founder of the dutch games studio Vlambeer, he is a constant traveller, darting between industry conferences all over the world. Ostensibly, his home is in the Netherlands, but he reckons he was only there for 40 days last year. He probably spent more time in airports, where, because of his Egyptian heritage and rucksack full of gadgets and cables, the security process can be as challenging as one of his games. Last year, he started a website named Did Rami Get Random Checked, logging all the times he was marked for extra security attention. It happens a lot.

We finally meet at the PG Connects smartphone gaming conference in London. He’s due to deliver a keynote on “indie survival” and is volunteering to judge at another session for industry newcomers, but somehow, I prise him away for 20 minutes.

I’m desperate to catch him because Vlambeer is one of the most fascinating developers in the world right now. Founded in 2010, when Ismail and his friend Jan Willem “JW” Nijman dropped out of a university course in game design, the studio soon released Super Crate Box, a twitchy platform shooter praised for its lightning pace and uncompromising difficulty. Later came the crazed angling sim Ridiculous Fishing and 2D dogfighter, Luftrausers, both similarly lauded for their tight yet frenzied mechanics.

The current project is Nuclear Throne, a post-apocalyptic role-playing shooter, filled with heavily armed mutants, warring over control of a scorched landscape. It was originally created for a 48-hour game jam, but two years later, JW – a brilliant coder and designer with a genius for creating rat trap-like compulsion loops – is still perfecting it.

“We knew it was fun but we didn’t quite realise what we had,” shrugs Ismail. “People just couldn’t stop playing it – and we couldn’t stop developing it. We thought maybe we’d wrap it up in six months, but we just kind of fell in love with the game. Then we put it into Steam Early Access and the community became such a huge part of our lives – it’s really hard to wrap something like that up.”

The Early Access generation

Vlambeer is at the forefront of a new era in game development, facilitated by Early Access, an area of the PC gaming download site Steam, where fans can pay to play unfinished projects. It works for gamers because they get to help shape games they’re looking forward to, and it works for developers because they can refine projects before full release. But the system comes with its challenges.

“Early Access has thrown a wrench into a lot of ideas about what game development is,” says Ismail. “I’ll admit that we have fallen into feature creep, but usually in our games that means even more ridiculous weapons, so it’s not that bad. However, we’ve had moments where we’ve said, OK, are we adding this feature to make the game better or just for the sake of adding it? We’ve had to learn discipline. Our biggest problem is that our community is now too good at the game - we need to get feedback from new players. All of the issues are so different from what we’re used to. As a producer, it’s been fascinating to figure out how we solve them.”

Ismail’s interest in business development has taken him beyond the usual games industry circuit – North America, Europe, Japan – and into emerging territories. “There are a lot of interesting places right now,” he says. “Last year I spent some time in India, which is obviously booming – especially in mobile games. I was very impressed with Uruguay. South Africa has an amazing development community.”

He says he has started to see patterns in how territories evolve. “You begin with a disconnected group of people making games – they don’t talk, they don’t know each other. Then eventually they start to organise, they hold events, they attend international conferences, and finally someone is successful and releases a hit. Every new territory needs a hero they can admire, but that they also want to rebel against - it must be both. As soon as you have that, an industry develops.”

We talk about how different national cultures imprint on to the games they make. Seemingly unrelated aspects can have an effect on game design. In India, for example, Ismail noticed that a lot of the hit mobile games revolve around specific sorts of puzzles with only one solution – like sudoku. “When I pointed out that trend to Indian developers they said, ‘well, India is very much a service culture – we fulfil specific tasks provided by other people’,” says Ismail. “That’s fascinating. A lot of people think I go to different places to teach people about development, but I go to find out what’s happening. This is a beautiful medium and it’s expanding rapidly.”

A schism in gaming culture

The expansion hasn’t come without cost or trauma. The explosion of video games beyond their historic core of young males has brought in new voices and experiences, but also resistance. The Gamergate controversy, which kicked off last August, is a sort of leaderless online protest against suspected cronyism and corruption in games journalism, but its “enemies” are often progressive industry figures who are suspected of wanting to censor and re-shape the medium. This is not so much about “ethics in journalism”, the mantra of Gamergate; it is about sociocultural conflict.

Ismail has been regularly caught in the vociferous online debates. A well-known industry figure, he’s not afraid to wade in, and when he does, his responses get amplified around social media. He has been critical of Gamergate, but understands its impetus.

“Gamergate was inevitable – it’s not a thing we could have avoided,” he says. “These movements have been in motion since the early 2000s, and what has happened is fascinating from a sociological perspective – although tremendously depressing, personally. Very clearly, a group of people are completely disenfranchised with the direction games are going in, and they don’t know who to blame so they blame anyone who has any sort of say in the industry – but not the people they like. The developers who are still making the games they appreciate – they’re fine, but the people trying to make new stuff, or reporting on new stuff, or have any sympathy for new stuff, are all obviously part of a huge conspiracy.”

According to Ismail, maintaining that conspiracy is now a vital element of the movement. “When it started, they were in this really interesting position where they were both the weak and the strong party,” he says. “They were weak because this is a huge industry that they are just a small part of, but they also had to appear strong because you can’t attract people if you’re not potentially powerful. No one will join a hopeless cause. They had to balance that in a really specific way, and the people who ran the campaign at the start were good at it.

“But what eventually happened was, as Gamergate grew, they couldn’t remain the underdog, even though they had to. You can’t be a revolt against something that you’re as loud as. So every time they grew, they invented a new conspiracy that was slightly bigger so they could retain the underdog status. I don’t think that was intentional, it’s just how something like that grows.”

Ismail feels that Gamergate, or at least the frustrations that it embodies, will not be going away: the conservative viewpoint it seems to represent is fixed. It is part of the landscape. But this needn’t be a problem. “If the harassment and abuse stops, I think we could happily live as a medium where there’s a traditionalist conservative sector,” he says. “One of the people I most admire in this is Brandon Orselli who started a website called NicheGamer. I don’t agree with anything he writes, but I appreciate his approach: ‘There’s a problem so let’s fix it’, rather than, ‘There’s a problem, so let’s demonise our enemies.’ But I have the luxury of being able to give people the benefit of the doubt. Zoe Quinn can’t do that. That’s the worst thing.”

The future beyond the Throne

For Vlambeer, the key concern is finishing Nuclear Throne. It’ll be coming to PC first and then PlayStation 4 and Vita – all later this year. Probably. But both Ismail and JW are eager to get started on something new; he talks about his generation of indie developers – the class of 2010 – and how a lot of them have had a shot at making a big successful title, but now want to scale back and experiment with smaller projects. “We have a little prototype of a game that we think might be fun, so maybe we’ll work on that,” he says. “We like streaming, so maybe we’ll develop it live on Twitch.”

For Ismail, the interesting thing about Vlambeer remains its confrontational nature. “Normally with a game studio, you get people who are aligned,” he says. “They may not agree about everything, but they have a similar vision. But me and JW don’t have that at all – we’re more about collision, and when that happens we don’t know where it’s going to end up or how far it’s going to shoot.

“With Nuclear Throne, we’ve known for too long about where things are going. Having an understanding with JW is so alien, and it’s not why Vlambeer exists. We want to create something we can disagree over. We want to collide again.”